Ore no Ryouri

Overview

Ore No Ryouri is a Japanese restaurant management simulator, originally released in Japan for the PlayStation on September 9th, 1999. A demo was also included on a PlayStation Underground demo disc as a featured import. A digital version was released on August 20, 2007 on the Japanese PlayStation Store.

Due to the games popularity it was added to the “Best of” PlayStation releases in Japan and later a PlayStation 2 party/board game, Gacharoku, was created based on the characters and art style.

Premise

The player takes the role of a young chef, who must cook his way up through 9 different restaurant levels, cooking a variety of 39 different dishes.

The game utilizes the dual-analog sticks in an innovative way to simulate the actions of various kitchen activities such as chopping carrots, stirring soup and pouring beers. Also occasional mini games pop up that have the player washing dishes, squashing bugs and chasing robbers down the street. All controlled with the dual-analog sticks.

The game features single-player and various multiplayer modes. Including cooking challenges and a head to head mode.

Gameplay

Patrons enter the restaurant and take a seat at the bar on the bottom of the screen. Their order is then added to a queue on the left of the screen. Players can have up to 6 orders in queue at once and multiple dishes-in varying stages-on the go.

Selecting the order brings up the cooking mode. For example, to chop a carrot the player moves the left stick to slide his/her hand down the carrot and use an up and down motion on the right stick to chop. To pour a beer, you tilt the glass with the left stick and pour with the right, filling the glass to the customer’s request.

More complicated dishes require multiple steps. To make soup the player needs to chop the vegetable in step one, and then stir the soup for step two.

With multiple dishes on the go it can get quite hectic managing everything and still satisfying the customer. All of the player's hard work results in cash, the better the job the bigger the pay-off.

As the player progresses through the different restaurant levels the variety and difficulty of the dishes increases. Also, in between levels the player is occasionally challenged to cook-offs by a rival frog chef and his crew.